My Honest Opinion About Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM)

Now compose support iOS ui.

Started to discover KMM now (January 2023) and was not expecting any of the mentioned "starting a project" issues. Started a project, rejected Cocoapods (the biggest issue is its existence - Swift Package Manager, wtf!), and ran the project. The only thing that needs to be done is to have XCode open to signing the project. Runs!

I don't see the "native ui on each platform" as a benefit. If you design a app you normally design it once. You put all the effort in one design which maybe fits your corporate design. Minor differences in usage (buttons vs gestures...) can be achieved with flutter easily. In Flutter business logic and ui are written once. Also in many cases the business logic will be implemented in some web service and not in the app.

KMM seems to have made a lot of improvements in such a short time since you just released the KMM course today

This video Perfectly describes my experience so far

New Technology is killing developers.

Do you agree with me?

Some Points:
- 2 person job can do by 1 (In Flutter: 7 person job can do by 1 - Android, ios, web, windows,macos, linux, embedded)
- Simplified development killing developer's thinking knowledge
- .....

For building apps, I agree. However for building distributed frameworks, it's a absolute game changer for all the obvious reasons. I admit it helps if you have previous iOS experience and know how to wrangle with XCode. I would avoid Kotlin's cocoapod temple and instead use their 'embedAndSignAppleFrameworkForXcode' gradle task from an build phase run script, which will do all the work of embedding your module in the application.

In my opinion, web is the future if it standardize api for native features. Web already cross platform, why we need so many technologies. :)

react native is better in that manner

one thing i understand in all coding frameworks is that nothing is perfect at all, no mater what you choose to work with you will always hit the wall one day.

Beta already there. Anyone tried? Any updated comments? 🤔

Same experience with me. I will wait kmm improvements.

In my company our app works with graphql and there are a lot of same code because of apollo. So we started to use kmm we want to manage all graphql queries, mutations and fragments from one place. I watched your tutorials which is weather and cryptocurrency app and now i’m try to build your mvvm hilt structure in my kmm project with koin, kodein and moko mvvm libraries. I couldn’t do it yet but i hope i will do it. In my dream after whole kmm app finished ios and android developers just coding the ui and use viewmodels which comes from kmm app. What do you think about it, do you think i’m on the right way ?

And by the way we are using this library as a spm library on ios side and we didn’t get any problems yet.

Negative feedback is SO valuable these days. Seems Xamarin is way ahead :)

Waiting for your tutorials in KMM

To be honest I would not use KMM for Mobile Crossplattform Development, because you can't safe any time in comparision to use for example Flutter, Ionic ... . But to write Android Apps, Desktop Applications and Web Applications it looks like a real game changer

can KMM be used on windows in Andorid Studio , I am asking because if we have to also write swift code in IOS package required folder and in windows and there we cannot have XCode , so please confirm me can we do KMM on windows or not ..??

and also as you said that it is not like Flutter with single code base we have to write both kotlin and swift code seperately for UI but only logic and some other code is shared among the both so it is true to say that is KMM creates 100% Native App like Andorid with Kotlin and IOS with swift3 if yes then I think KMM is very very better than hybrid tool like react Native , Flutter , Phone Gap, etc ..
please also confirm this ..??

I made some (personal) KMP apps with JVM, JS and Android targets. I have to say the sharing of code is a delight but yeah the setup is very bad. Also just having a kmp app with 1 android target (for example: You wish to be prepared for a future sharing of code, but for now at least want to separate platform code from pure kotlin code) breaks in Android studio with the latest release. The Jetbrains team and Google team were severely misaligned (I saw a topic on kotlin slack describing this) and the developer at jetbrains did need to remind the people it is still in alpha, even after this many years. However, he also wrote that they are actually aligning their efforts now and generate actual api's that both jetbrains and android studio can implement as to not have severely broken builds after upgrading your AGP. So for now, I'm scared to use it in an actual production app for any iOS/native targets, even though sharing code between backend and multiple frontend targets is very easy and powerful already, if you can get the setup right... I think the part where you missed out: how do you interact between swift and kotlin? I am not an iOS developer and I do not wish to use a macbook, so to prepare shared code so that iOS devs can use it would also be a topic where one can learn how to better cooperate with the other platform.

I know how you feel Philipp, I had my own dose of errors using KMM, but I noticed that most of those erros came from the iOS side of the coin. Specially cocoapods, so I ended up not using it, and using swift package as a dependency manager, as well as the shared module embedded, and everything went way more smoothly. But I still find it very hard and confusing to incorporate a new KMM module to a an existing iOS/ Android project. Which my company want to trying migrate to. Other than that, works pretty well.

KMM is a pipe dream.

For me it took 1 day to see my hello world text on screen
first fixed ruby version issue... it showed ruby version should be >= 2.5
followed by cocoapods not installed though it installed already
then somehow i got the clue to change from 11 version to 10 and worked.
now because cocoapods version is 10 , I am not able to run iosApp and showing version is below 11
hahaha

When the project itself is still in dev mode and you say you’re disappointed. Bruh

Nightmare has been my experience 😂. I would build the complete app by now in Xcode with the time I lost trying to configure KMM.

No Mac No KMM Sorry Boss 😅😁

It will change, Remember how Android project setup was 6-7 years ago.

Hi! Make video about Maps Compose, Please!

It's pain once in a while but let me tell you straight it works! Little nagging issues keep popping bit so far we're doing well on Production, almost 2 years now. A little pain for iOS team and sometimes dependency resolutions but I am happy with it tbh.

Stopped using KMM for exactly the same reasons. KMM is truely not production ready. Maybe some day in the future.

You seem like a junior who couldn't figure things out. In fact, a lot of your videos are very junior level. Code with Mitch a lot better

You are right, at the moment to set up the iOS environment, you might want to throw your computer through the window 😅 LOL

But, I love it, although I prefer the KMP concept instead of KMM, to include web, backend, desktop, and command-line (smartwatch is mobile), this multiplatform makes your life easier when you want to use the Kotlin DSL features in other platforms (not just Android).

Also, It's great at the moment to implement in other platforms the Redux/State Machine architecture using kotlin StateFlow and Coroutines.

Please 🙏 try as soon as possible with KMP; you are the best of the best.
All your videos are helping all your subscribers and not subscribers in the world. 🙌

Ktor and sqldelight are polished and arguably better than Room and Retrofit, so it already makes sense to build Android with KMM. Skate to where the puck is going.

Hi Philipp Lackner, I would like you make a video, how to impl How to impl LazyVerticalGrid with set full span or dynamic num of GridCells.Fixed in jetpack compose.

I'm using it in production, and have been doing so for more than a year. I have the M1 as well. You're right that it's a pain to get it to work but once you do, it just works

ofc it doesn't work..

I think KMM is more dedicated for entreprises which have ios and android developers.
For a developer thats work alone or willing to be effective on both platform, you had better to go to react native/ flutter, you will learn one stack, one IDE.
I hope my company dive into it, however I will never use it for my personal projects

KMM is the future, sure

For me, KMM used to be fragile, like Philipp described. Now, in my Intel Mac, the Xcode integration works seamlessly. Might the issues be related to M1 Macs?

I spent 2 days building ios and android hello world app

Had the same bad experience i am currently having it. Sooooo annoying. Can't really recommend it now. 😉

I know many companies using it in production.

When you make video with work manger and key store ?

Thanks for the info. Now I know I can wait a bit more before making a course about it :)

Thanks a lot, Philipp! I thought I was a loser not making KMM work and having to create two separate apps: one for Android, and one for iPhone.
Even to generate a single Android app, Android Studio is already so hard to use, with the indexing tasks, Gradle problems and so on...
Like you, I am waiting for a new version of KMM

Thanks for the high quality content...and The hilarious thumbnail😅

Flutter will kill all

is a pain to develop two UI, in intellij are really aware of that and also big Jake.

Hi Phillip, posting my comment again as I guess the previous one went into spam as I used a link.

I wanted to purchase your "Building Industry-Level Apps With Multi-Module Architecture" course, but there doesn't seem to be an add to cart option for this course (or at least I can not see it)

If its not available anymore, can you let me know when it will be open again.

All the best.

Will you make native iOS development videos in the future?